customer

How Product Managers Can Manage A Complex Sale

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As a commenter to one of my posting on this blog reminded me the other day, we Product Managers are really the CEOs of our product. This means that our ultimate responsibility is to make the product a success. Depending on your product and depending on your customer, you may occasionally find yourself in the … Read more

4 Key Success Factors For Being A Service Product Manger

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It’s hard enough to be a product manager for a “real” product, just imagine how hard this job gets when your company decides to switch over and start to offer service products. You’d think that a flexible product manager could just quickly adjust and that there would be no real difference between managing “hard” products … Read more

What’s A Product Manager To Do When Your Product Is A Service?

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Pick up just about any Product Management book, thumb through it, and you’ll quickly come to realize that most thinking about how to be a successful product manger is based on real products. Things that you can touch and feel. Things that people somewhere in the world manufacture. Even if you are responsible for a … Read more

Let’s Go Visit The Customer, Product Manager…

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So much has been written about how important it is to get in front of your (potential) customer that I am almost hesitant to add to the pile. However, in reviewing what’s out there, nobody really seems to have spent the time to lay out step-by-step what a product manger needs to do before and … Read more

Product Manger You Have A Great Product – So Just Buy It Already!

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As product managers, we are ultimately the source of all knowledge about our products: why it was created, what it does today, and what it will be able to do tomorrow. That being said, we often become part of a sales team when the sales rep has the relationship with the customer, but doesn’t understand … Read more

Product Managers & RFPs: It’s A Love / Hate Thing

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One of the unique things about being a product manager is that we wear many hats during a given day. The sales hat is one that we can find ourselves wearing a lot if our product is new, technical, or just basically foreign to our sales teams. As we find ourselves in unfamiliar sales territory, … Read more